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Saturday, January 23, 2016

You can listen to the Classical Music Almanac Podcast Daily here.

Birthdays

Muzio Clementi

In 1752 Muzio Clementi was born in Rome, however he spent most of his life in England. Encouraged to study music by his father, he was sponsored as a young composer by Sir Peter Beckford who took him to England to advance his studies. Later, he toured Europe numerous times from his long-time base in London. It was on one of these occasions in 1781 that he engaged in a piano competition with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Influenced by Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord school and Haydn’s classical school and by the stile galante of Johann Christian Bach and Ignazio Cirri, Clementi developed a fluent and technical legato style, which he passed on to a generation of pianists, including John Field, Johann Baptist Cramer, Ignaz Moscheles, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Friedrich Kalkbrenner, Johann Nepomuk Hummel and Carl Czerny. He was a notable influence on Ludwig van Beethoven. Clementi also produced and promoted his own brand of pianos and was a notable music publisher. Because of this activity, many compositions by Clementi’s contemporaries and earlier artists have stayed in the repertoire. Though the European reputation of Muzio Clementi was second only to Joseph Haydn in his day, his reputation languished for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. 1

David Arnold

Happy 54th birthday David Arnold! He is best known for scoring five James Bond films, Stargate (1994), Independence Day (1996), Godzilla (1998) and the television series Little Britain and Sherlock. For Independence Day he received a Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition Written for a Motion Picture or for Television and for Sherlock he, and co-composer Michael Price, won a Creative Arts Emmy for the score of “His Last Vow”, the final episode in the third series. Arnold is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers and Authors. 2

Premieres

In 1895 Edward MacDowell’s Indian Suite was premiered in New York City by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Emil Paur conducting.

In 1948 David Diamond’s Symphony No. 4 was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Leonard Bernstein conducting.

In 1963 Peter Mennin’s Symphony No. 7 was premiered by the Cleveland Orchestra with George Szell conducting.

On This Day in Classical Music

In 1894 Antonín Dvořák presented a concert of African-American choral music at Madison Square Concert Hall in New York, using an all-black choir, comprised chiefly of members of the St. Philip’s Colored Choir. On the program was the premiere performance of Dvorák’s own arrangement of Stephen Foster’s “Old Folks at Home,” which featured vocal soloists Sissierette Jones and Harry T. Burleigh. 

In 1943 Duke Ellington and his orchestra presented their first concert at Carnegie Hall in New York with the “official” premiere of Ellington’s “Black, Brown and Beige” Suite (although this work had received its world premiere at a trial performance the preceding day at Rye High School in Rye, New York).

  1. Wikipedia contributors, “Muzio Clementi,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Muzio_Clementi&oldid=700039531 (accessed January 23, 2016).
  2. Wikipedia contributors, “David Arnold,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=David_Arnold&oldid=695969286 (accessed January 23, 2016).